About Us

The present Library and Information Services Council (Northern Ireland) dates back to 1978 when it was known as the Library Advisory Council. It changed its name to LISC in 1982. An earlier Northern Ireland Library Advisory Council had been in existence from 1950 but had ceased activities on the establishment of the Education and Library Boards in 1973.

Today the Council’s mission is to maintain and enhance the standard of library and information services in Northern Ireland by:

providing advice and consultation to the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure and other Government Departments;
providing a representative voice for the library and information sector;
acting as a catalyst for progress and development in all areas of library and information provision.

The Council is made up of subscribing member organizations from library and information providers in the public, academic, government, voluntary and commercial sectors. Additional funding, currently some £40,000 per annum for core activities, is provided by the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL).

The Council is governed by an Executive Committee made up of an elected Chair, Honorary Secretary and Honorary Treasurer and nominees appointed under the terms of the Constitution. The Executive Committee appoints a Finance and General Purposes Committee to manage the detailed business including the setting and oversight of the budget and the drafting and monitoring of the annual Action Plan.

Much of the Council’s work is taken forward by its Panels and Working Parties:

The Northern Ireland Publications Resource collects and catalogues books published in Northern Ireland and makes the records available via its website. This project receives specific funding from DCAL, currently in the order of £27,000.

The Newsplan project is engaged in microfilming historic newspapers to make the material more widely available and to reduce the risk of damage to or loss of fragile and irreplaceable originals.

Celebrating Local History 2006 has been supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund to encourage people to explore local history. Although the funding is short term the project has a number of more long term outcomes.

LISC’s record of success and achievement with modest resources and staffing over recent years has been significant.

LISC has produced and published the School Library Guidelines, which are being used in schools throughout the Province to raise standards of provision. We have followed this up with the production of quality frameworks for children and young people’s services covering both education library services and community library services.
In 2006, LISC made comprehensive recommendations to the public library service for improvements in access to information technology and electronic information by blind and partially sighted people. The first response from government is the allocation of £50,000 to the Education and Library Boards for the purchase of large flat screen computer monitors for all libraries.
Also in 2006 LISC commissioned and made available a Disaster Planning Handbook and an Inventory of Resources for disaster planning and response to help organisations protect their irreplaceable resource collections.
LISC has worked in partnership with the University of Ulster to develop locally available courses leading to qualifications for library and information workers